


what you are, there is nothing else

by hardscrabble



Series: and my glance turns to a stare [3]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Character Study, Developing Friendships, Gen, Perfectionism, Rivalry, what does an angry boy do when he does not know how to lose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 22:41:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14882577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardscrabble/pseuds/hardscrabble
Summary: Yuri spends the rest of his first season all but choking on all of the stuff he's not going to allow himself to say if it kills him, and it nearly does, but he still wins Russian nationals, the MNNT Cup, the European Championships, and the Coupe du Printemps. So of course it’s Worlds where he finishes fourth.This is how he spends his first sixteen-ish hours as a skater not ranked among the top three on the planet. [Part of a series, but it's complete as a standalone.]





	what you are, there is nothing else

**Author's Note:**

> (Content warning: Descriptions of minor skating-related and unrelated injuries, passing reference to disordered eating. Please take care.)

Yuri refuses to take the out that Yakov offers, because he is not a fucking coward. Instead, he remains in the bleachers, a few rows up from the ice where he’s been since he got his sneakers after his own skate, through the awards ceremony. Beneath his Team Russia jacket, his free-skate bodysuit itches at the back of his neck, his right shoulder, a spot on his ribs where the fishnet meets Lycra, the webbing between thumb and index finger on his left hand. He tunes out all those little points of discomfort and the bigger one that is his entire body, one unified ache, just ignores them, because he is not a fucking coward, and keeps his eyes on the rink. The podium. Where he is not.

The Katsudon is in the center; he broke his free skate record and finally managed not to fuck up his short program. He’s still got his hair slicked back and his face, still strange without glasses, is trying to do about nine expressions at once: happiness and pride and _who, me?_ and _whoa, me!_ and _am I awake?_ and _I can’t see shit!_ and _finally_ and _holy shit_ and _I’m just so surprised to be here_ , and he probably actually honestly is, and when they put the ribbon around his neck he grabs at the medal and stares at it in his palm in plain disbelief.

To the Katsudon’s left—Yuri’s right—is the old man, flipping silvery hair out of his face because he’s still too much of an idiot to figure out how his own fringe works and swapping between for-the-press smiles and these melting looks at his fiancé, who Yuri supposes he’s actually going to fucking marry now, considering the gold gleam off the Katsudon’s medal. Nikiforov holds up his own bronze and kisses the edge of it, then turns again to Katsuki and asks something, and Katsuki goes pink and bends toward Nikiforov and they’re kissing _each other’s_ medals, because they’re disgusting, and the photographers go nuts and make them do it another four times, and before he gags, Yuri looks to the left.

Otabek brushes one hand against the silver medallion, exactly once, as if he’s checking to make sure it’s centered. He doesn’t kiss it or bite it or even so much as lift it until one of the photographers explicitly directs him to, and the woman has to repeat the instruction twice before he processes it properly. His face is still, mouth set in a firm line, chin jutting—the only way his pride shows. Katsuki asks him something after he’s done being horrendous with Nikiforov; Otabek glances over and answers in three syllables, then looks back to the cameras.

When Yuri finally changes out of his costume, after the medalists leave for the press conference, the space between his left thumb and forefinger is a bloody ruin.

***

It’s been a long season. The reckoning after the GPF in December has been eating at Lilia ever since, for one thing. Sure, he’d _won_ ; he’d convinced Yakov who’d convinced Lilia that he could mold himself into any shape they asked during competition without losing it, that he would play any role they wanted to the hilt if he could have his gala skate, but Lilia hasn’t forgiven him.

She doesn’t let that affect training, of course, or if she does, it only makes her push harder, but their dynamic hasn’t been right and living in her house has been a crash course in minefield navigation since Barcelona. Yuri doesn’t play music without headphones anymore; he no longer checks his phone unless he’s in his room with the door shut; he’s stopped wearing t-shirts for his favorite bands, each time after he clocked some critical number of her increasingly disdainful _sniffs_ when he’s done something that reminds her that he’s not her doll, not entirely, not anymore. Yakov grumbles but doesn’t get into it with her, although it’s not like Yuri expects him to. They’re not parents; they’re just pretending they are, and they suck at it.

Despite the pressure, despite the existence of JJ Leroy, despite Viktor Nikiforov returning to the rink in St. Petersburg with the Katsudon in tow, despite Yakov’s split attention and Lilia’s passive-aggressive crap and Yuri all but choking on all of the stuff he was not going to allow himself to say if it killed him, and it nearly did, he’d won Russian nationals, won the MNNT Cup, taken gold at the European Championships—and standing above Viktor Nikiforov on all three podiums was better than anything except Potya—and won the Coupe du Printemps two weeks ago.

So of course it’s Worlds where he’s goddamn fourth. Followed, but not by enough, by Leroy and Giacometti.

He knows what he did wrong. He two-footed one of his quads, underrotated another, made a mess of one of his combos. In the short program, he’d known throughout that his presentation was off; he was too self-aware. His scores, as a pair of numbers, are reasonable; they accurately reflect what he was and was not able to do on the ice in the last two days.

They are also not enough.

He knows what _they_ did _right_.

The Katsudon has been cleaning his programs, nailing down every last jump and twist and posture while leaving in all this room for _expression_. Nikiforov finally stopped being a wuss and came out to skate for real, having determined that he wasn’t going to break a hip.

Nikiforov returned to the ice is… not the goddamn production of Nikiforov before he lost his mind to Katsuki Yuuri, if only because _even Viktor Nikiforov_ couldn’t commission music and conjure costumes from sketch to finished product in the two weeks he gave himself between announcing his return and Russian nationals in Sochi. His programs are themed, because of fucking course they are, but tenuously: the music for both is by the same dead Russian.

Of course, Yuri wasn’t careful enough once and let the old man keep talking—he’d been scrolling Instagram and Otabek had posted a photo of a girl with exactly his eyebrows holding an enormous fluffy gray cat, captioned “my favorite sister & Feruza,” and the comments on it from @feruzaaa were hilarious—and next thing he knew Nikiforov was explaining how one was inspired by _Arabian Nights_ and the other was about fairies. The two selections were intended to play off Middle Eastern versus European folklore, but they were both _actually_ about bewitchment and transformation. Which meant that they were both about the Katsudon, because Nikiforov is as subtle as a goddamn brick to the face.

Regardless, Nikiforov returned to the ice is still Nikiforov on ice.

Yuri supposes that most other skaters on the planet would happily kill to have taken gold to Nikiforov’s silver in three consecutive competitions.

Which is too bad for them, because he’s already pretty much died for it.

And there’s Otabek.

Somewhere along the line, in the six weeks after taking bronze at Four Continents, Otabek Altin—his friend—cleaned both a quad flip and a quad loop. Which means he’s been working on them for months, at least, including through the Grand Prix series, without breathing a word to anyone beyond his coach.

Furthermore, despite his dissembling about being shit at choreography and remembering new stuff, he’d swapped his combo in his short program to use the quad loop; in the FS, he’d bumped both his flip and loop from triples to quads, plus he’d modified his first quad toe loop into a combination with a triple flip.

Yuri had only known that he’d fixed his camel spin, the lummox, finally getting his free leg straight the way Yuri has been telling him to since Barcelona. Otabek had posted a video Karim recorded of it.

And all of that—the camel spin, the quads, the combos, the choreo, the shit he’s been saying as long as Yuri’s known him that he can’t do—got him precisely midway between the sweethearts of men’s figure skating at Worlds, leaving Yuri in his first and last competition of his first season as a senior _off_ the podium.

In _fourth goddamn place_.

He could spit.

He doesn’t let himself.

***

It’s been hours out of his costume, now; aside from literally everything in his body aching one way or another, he’s almost comfortable in a shitty stretched-out t-shirt and joggers, but his hand still itches.

The hotel room is exactly like all hotel rooms in other tourist areas of other big cities, even though this big city is Shanghai. He’s flipped all the pillows to somewhere in the middle of the bed and is lying with his thighs against the headboard, legs crossed far over his head up on the wall. It’s half-stretching, half-admiring how absolutely fucked up his feet are at the end of the season: split toenails, bruises running the gamut from fresh pink to deep navy to washes of yellow, scabbed blisters up his ankles, fresh ones around his toes. His earbuds are in and his phone is playing some EDM album. The sound (driving bass, synth loaded with reverb, no vocals) is almost an anchor, and he cannot fucking believe Otabek cleaned a goddamn quad loop without _telling him_.

A particularly sharp tear of pain registers over the generalized low-level burn from his left hand. He holds up both hands to look at them. The left is bleeding again from two sets of scratches and several previous scabs, and there’s blood under the nails on his first two fingers of his right.

_Nice, Plisetsky._

The thudding electronic crap cuts out long enough for his phone to beep a text alert. Yuri sucks the blood off his fingers, contemplating possibilities. It’s a bit past nine, local time; the press conference is well over. The text could be from any of Yakov’s, really, or from Yakov himself, although that seems doubtful. The man had actually hugged him, one-armed, after the final scores were up, which fulfills his demonstrativeness quota for the calendar year; besides, he usually leaves Yuri alone, unless they’re training. He’s not Lilia.

Lilia, as a rule, does not text. Thankfully.

Mila—she’d won gold, to no one’s surprise except her own—might be checking in, which wouldn’t suck. Even if she just wants to tell him what she’s doing with Sara Crispino (silver) for the night. Or the PG edited-for-children version of what she’s doing with Sara for the night, because she insists on continuing to pretend Yuri possesses innocence to preserve, as if he hasn’t been on the Internet since he was seven. It still wouldn’t suck.

It might be the Katsudon, which—Yuri doesn’t sigh, and he can’t slump because he’s already horizontal, but he feels something like heartburn as he realizes: Katsuki, if he’s texting, is probably only going to be supportive, and that wouldn’t necessarily suck, either; it’d just feel exactly like biting into a lemon to admit as much.

If it’s Nikiforov, he’d be saying the same words as Katsuki, but he’d mean them with some kind of twisty double-speak, and it’d be goddamn unbearable.

The last possibility is Otabek, and that—

—No, that’s not happening.

He focuses on his hands again. The left is starting to drip. And it’s still itchy.

The music cuts again for another text alert.

Yuri jerks out his earbuds without looking at his phone; they hiss tinny little pretend basslines to the empty air as he swings his legs down and gets up. He nearly blacks out, but big fucking deal; he catches himself on the wall and breathes through it. Just getting up too quickly after lying flat. Shit happens.

Someone raps on his door. He ignores it and pads to the bathroom where he left his first-aid kit, digs out a few alcohol wipes, tears the first open, and swears loudly and colorfully at the sting.

“Yuri,” says whoever’s at the door. Otabek. “Okay?”

The first alcohol wipe is saturated but there’s still dried blood on his hand. He pitches it and swipes at his hand with the second, and this time bites down on the swearing but hisses instead.

“Hey, Yuri,” Otabek says.

It’s probably the little rainbow _loading_ wheel spinning in his head, plus the sharp sour pain in his hand, that makes him go to the door and open it. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look up, just opens the door and heads back to the bathroom.

“Yuri?”

“Shut the door, cretin,” he says, and his voice nearly stays level as he applies swab number three. His hand seems clean enough, finally, the rust of dried blood gone, although he’s not sure what he’s going to do with the general irritation—it still fucking itches.

“Your hand,” says Otabek.

“No shit, my hand.” He paws through his kit. Neosporin is easy; maybe hydrocortisone for the rest, and just gauze the hell out of it, or a hydrocolloid bandage, if he has any—he fumbles one-handed and the kit falls off the bathroom counter, scattering ointments and Band-Aids and rolls of bandage and whatever on the floor. “ _Fuck_.”

Otabek is there immediately, placing the kit upright on the floor and setting aside the antiseptic. The hydrocortisone is near enough. Yuri snatches the two tubes off the tile.

“Don’t mix those,” Otabek says.

“Whatever.” There’s a warning on the hydrocortisone tube about broken skin. Fine. He manages the antiseptic, holding the cap between his left middle and ring fingers and twisting with the right hand, applying out of the tube and then dabbing the gel into place with his right index finger, and then—stands there, glaring at his goopy hand, because bandaging this one-handed may be beyond his abilities, but hell if he’s going to—

“I got it,” says Otabek, and he gets up from the floor with a box of non-stick gauze pads in one hand and a roll of med tape in another.

“Fuck off, I’ll do it.”

He grabs for the med tape, but Otabek puts it and the gauze on the counter and washes his hands instead, as he asks, “How?”

Yuri is suddenly furious. “Fuck _off_ ,” he repeats.

“No,” Otabek says. “Hand out.”

“How fucking _heroic_ of you—”

“ _Hand_ ,” he says again, with enough steel in his voice that he sounds like Lilia, and Yuri holds out his hand and makes himself actually look at Otabek. He’s dressed in a black t-shirt and black jeans with his biker jacket, like he’s ready to go somewhere, and he’s nearly _actually_ expressionless as he rips one of the gauze pads out of its sterile wrapping and folds it over the side of Yuri’s hand, between index finger and thumb. “Hold,” he says, and his voice is still steely as Yuri holds the gauze in place and Otabek rips off two strips of tape; he sticks one to his pinky finger and slaps the other over the gauze, wrapping from Yuri’s knuckles onto the palm of his hand. The second goes an inch lower, onto the meat of his thumb. “Done,” says Otabek, and closes the two boxes and shoves them back in the first-aid kit, before he looks up at Yuri. His eyes are unreadable. More so than usual. “Still want me to fuck off?”

Yuri huffs and kneels to finish cleaning up the dropped kit as his face goes hot. “Whatever,” he says to the floor.

“Yes or no?”

“Would you _give me a minute_ ,” Yuri snaps, tossing two rolls of bandage tape into the box and closing it. He gets up, knees popping, and manages to put the kit down before he has to steady himself on the counter against another dizzy spell. Head rush. Whatever. It’s nothing, it’s _nothing_ , and neither is he, apparently, in medals or in anything else if Otabek can’t fucking tell him he nailed a quad loop—

“Yuri?”

“That was not a minute,” Yuri says, as soon as his vision clears. His hand fucking itches.

Otabek is looking him over, he can tell, his angry eyebrows back to default. “Did you eat?” he asks.

Yuri rolls his eyes. “I’m not a child.”

“When did you eat?”

He considers possible responses and the potential responses to those responses. “Lunch.” The thing his face does is not a smile; it just uses the same muscles.

Otabek’s eyebrows furrow. Concern, or just evaluation. “Want to—”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Yuri says instantly. He swipes at his left hand with his right; Otabek grabs his right wrist and holds it away from the bandage. “Fuck _off_ , it _itches_.”

“Ice pack,” says Otabek.

If he were anyone else, Yuri would say Otabek storms out of the bathroom, where they’ve been having this completely non-excruciating half-conversation, but he’s Otabek, so he just turns on his heel and, Yuri sees as he follows, goes to the mini fridge. He takes one of the gel packs out of the tiny freezer compartment, heads back to the bathroom, and returns, handing Yuri the pack wrapped in a hand towel. “Hold that. And sit.”

Yuri sits on the end of his bed and folds his legs up, feet together, knees out to either side. His hips pop as he bends into the stretch, knees touching and then staying flat on the mattress; there are still some things Otabek can’t do. He rests his hand on his left thigh and positions the gel pack in its towel over it.

For some reason he can’t be fucked to care about, Otabek is shuffling through the mound of papers on the room’s tiny fake desk—printed-out schedules, because Yakov is even more of a dinosaur than Nikiforov, on top of the hotel crap. He surfaces with the hotel’s fake-classy Services brochure, saying, “Room service. ’Til midnight.” He makes like he’s going to frisbee-toss it across the room and Yuri doesn’t really duck; he just folds over on himself.

Otabek doesn’t throw it.

“Yuri,” he says.

“Not eating that shit,” says Yuri to his right patella. Room service is even more the same than the hotel rooms it goes along with, and it’s all heinous. Besides, his stomach feels like…nothing. He couldn’t eat even if he wanted to. Which he knows is weird, and he knows what this might look like, because he’s an athlete in a sport that relies on aesthetics and he’s been getting lectures on healthy relationships with food, quote un-fucking-quote, since he was nine. But skipping one meal isn’t a hunger strike.

There is silence.

“Did the Katsudon not invite you wherever with the old man?” he finds himself saying. It sounds twisted, spiteful, practically choked with bitterness.

Otabek sets down the menu and replies, “He asked if I thought you’d want to go along. I didn’t.”

Silence again, until Yuri says, too flatly for it to be a question, “Why are you here,” looking at Otabek without moving. He’s lying flat on his own right leg, chin just above his knee, left leg folded on his other side, and he imagines it probably looks dumb as fuck. It pulls along his left side, which hurts, but in a good way.

Otabek observes Yuri for a moment, and then asks, “Is this what you _do?_ ”

“Stretch better than you can?”

“Rip up your hands, refuse to eat, flop around like a puppet with its strings cut—”

“I’m not a _fucking_ puppet,” he snarls, and wonders briefly about _that_ being what gets to him.

“Fine. Is this your thing? When you lose?”

In the cool stale air of the hotel room, the word falls flat and without ripples, like a rock into heavy oil.

Yuri levers himself up on his right arm and resettles his ice pack around his other hand, carefully, precisely, folding the towel around the gel pack and tucking it neatly into itself after it’s settled over his thumb. As he smooths a wrinkle out of the fabric, he says, without looking up, “Wouldn’t know.” He pulls together all his remaining bluster and sneers. “Not intending to make a habit of it.”

He feels cold, out of balance, fragile, like if he moves incorrectly he’ll fall apart, which probably isn’t far off the mark. But it's his _job_ to move correctly. And he is good at his job.

Except for when he isn’t.

Otabek says, very quietly, “You wouldn’t.” A beat later, “I’d forgotten.”

Yuri rests his newly bundled hand in his lap and does not answer.

He’s tired, he realizes suddenly. He is goddamn exhausted. He doesn’t want—this, wherever this stilted not-conversation is going, he doesn’t want to follow it; Otabek is probably going to fall into his stupid sensible elder-skater mode despite being all of eighteen and a half and deliver some kind of fucking lecture, like he did sometime after the GPF banquet when Yuri had asked why and how he was taking fourth so well, about the temporality of this thing they have given their lives to, the iniquities of scoring versus talent versus performance, and Yuri is fucking tired.

He is also wrong about several things, he knows. Otabek has no reason to tell him about new jumps, or about anything to do with skating, not if he’s being honest with himself, and he is, because _he is not a fucking coward_. And if Otabek pulled punches, if he were to ignore that they’re competitors, just because they’re also friends, they wouldn’t _be_ friends.

There had been a few times this season, from April through December, when Yuri had gotten pissed and snitty because he hadn’t been perfect, or because someone was acting like they were upset when he wasn’t letting himself. It was in Barcelona, when he was trying to track down Otabek via half a dozen skaters across the planet, that he’d realized being a shit about other people feeling like crap was, essentially, fantastically hypocritical, considering that what _he_ wants, always, is to be better. To be enough. When he himself isn’t, he goes to pieces. The only question is how well he can hide it.

He’s not sure how much time has passed, because everything that is not the pain in his body feels indistinct, but Otabek hasn’t so much as twitched since he said that he’d forgotten that Yuri doesn’t lose. Hasn’t lost. Until today. And right now, Otabek is probably over the damn moon, which he _should_ be, and he’s still putting up with Yuri being a jackass. Which Yuri isn’t sure he deserves to be, and he is almost completely certain that he doesn’t deserve Otabek enduring him.

So, right now, as Otabek’s friend and rival, Yuri decides: he is going to suck it up for two damn minutes.

He stares at the terrycloth loops of the towel around his hand and says, “Look, I’m—tired.”

Otabek makes a noise in his throat that could mean anything, but at least means acknowledgment: Yuri did, actually, say that out loud.

“Thanks for helping with my hand,” he says, and inhales through his nose, digs his fingernails into his palm. “And—congratulations. I’m…going to be happy for you, I’m just—shitty. And tired.”

The silence this time makes him worry he forgot to keep talking, and just _thought_ those things, which means he’s going to have to dredge up the reserves to re-think them and say them out loud—

“Thanks.” Otabek says it so quietly it barely registers as a word, just a sibilant trailing on a breath.

Yuri closes his eyes—his eyelids are so goddamn heavy—and then pries them back open and glances at Otabek through his lashes, through his hair. “I’m—I don’t know. You probably have plans—”

“None. Wanted to see what you were up to.”

He spreads his hands wide: _see?_ “Now you know,” he says. “I’m going to pass out. I’ll be a person tomorrow. Sorry I’m—not.” Not enough, not enough, not enough, not enough.

Otabek stands up. “Nothing to be sorry for,” he says, as he heads across the room toward the door. He’s about six feet from it, six feet from Yuri, when he pauses and turns, faces Yuri, meets his eyes. “You’re doing better than I have.” His voice holds exactly one-third of a smile.

Yuri blinks and jerks one shoulder, not even a shrug, just kind of a spasm. “Whatever,” he says, and looks away.

“Rest up, Yuri.” The door clicks open, sighs shut; the lock activates.

He doesn’t move for a few moments, barely breathes as the tightness in his throat builds and then subsides. Then he lets himself flop backward on the mattress, still holding his legs in his lazy stretch; his hips and quads and lower back all complain.

He survived. He spoke to and congratulated his friend, who beat him fairly in competition, and he still has a friend, and he feels like he is fairly sure he is going to remain in one piece. Aside from all the bits that want to fall off.

But that’s just what skating is. If he's not hurting somewhere after a performance, he's performing wrong.

His phone is a foot or so from his head, silent after it ran out of playlist. As he’s looking at it, it buzzes, sending vibrations through the blanket and his hill of pillows, and he sighs and grabs it.

Three texts from two people.

[21:14 CST]

 **m_babicheva:** yurotchka – bet you’re having blahs – shit end to a stellar season. altin is asking about you so i’m going to send him your way unless you tell me not to?  
**m_babicheva:** ok he’s on his way – actually talking w/ him is up to you entirely. i’ll see you tomorrow – shout if you need anything earlier

[21:38 CST]

 **yuri_plisetsky:** thx baba  
**yuri_plisetsky:** \+ congrats

She replies within seconds, sending a string of varicolored heart emojis, and if Yuri smiles at his phone screen there are no witnesses.

[21:37 CST]

 **otabek_a:** also you’re not shitty.

That takes him a second to place, and once he does, the phone buzzes again.

[21:39 CST]

 **otabek_a:** meeting you at your door for breakfast at 9. you’ve been warned.

He doesn't reply, but he sets an alarm for 8:57 and finds a half-hour supercut of zoo footage of tiger cubs. He’s asleep before it hits the second third.

***

When he and Otabek set down their plates—Otabek’s a decent skating-today breakfast; Yuri’s a mess of refined starches drenched in extra sugar—across from each other at the informal Team Russia-and-hangers-on table, there’s a moment of unmistakable silence. An extremely brief moment, if only because Mila asks an ice dancer what he ended up doing the previous night almost instantly and the rest of the table takes their cues from her, but it’s there.

Before he picks up his fork, Yuri glances at Yakov, who is presiding over the opposite end of the table with an English-language newspaper. He looks up from Yuri’s plate, meets his eyes, and nods, doing something with his mouth that doesn’t suggest approval, but rather says _and you better enjoy it, kid_. Yuri’s officially off the hook, and happily—approximately happily—forks a bite of chocolate chip pancakes drowned in syrup into his face before he picks up his mug of coffee (four packets of sugar, two creamers).

On his left, Katsuki is listening intently to Nikiforov effuse about something probably incredibly boring when Yuri interrupts, growling over his coffee, “If you two go all GPF and get fucking married or something during the gala skate I swear I’ll torch your flat.”

Katsuki turns to him, eyes wide; on his other side, Nikiforov assesses him levelly for a second and then tips his chin by an almost imperceptible degree. It's nothing so overt or misplaced as pride, but rather an acknowledgment of him, Yuri, as a competitor.

It's almost as satisfying as beating him was.

Then Nikiforov dispatches one of his favorite smirks. “I don’t believe the government would invite us back, but that’s a _wonderful_ idea, Yurio,” he says.

“Not my name,” Yuri mutters, and takes another gulp of coffee.

“Besides, we booked Yu-Topia for next summer. My family would be heartbroken,” Katsuki says, all earnestness, and Yuri only has to glance at him to confirm that he’s doing that _thing_ where his eyes go all sparkly and he’s clearly attempting to telepathically convey how much he enjoys your presence, even if he’s giving you shit. Which, in Katsuki’s strange pleasant world of rounded edges and crayon colors, means joking obliquely and then getting embarrassed if you take him seriously.

Yuri replies, “ _Good_ ,” as darkly as he can, and then returns to his pancakes while reviewing the rest of the table. He’s not the only one dramatically abandoning the training diet; a girl on Mila’s left went nuts at the waffle bar, and Giacometti is halfway through an omelet that started off about the size of his head. When Chris catches him looking, he holds up his own fork in a silent approximation of a toast. Yuri nods in return. He has almost nothing in common with him, but they’re together in this, which feels weird, but not necessarily bad.

Christophe Giacometti turned 26 in February. He’s got maybe two seasons left; they’ll be good, because _he’s_ good, solid, but it’s unlikely he’ll top his silver from last year. Yuri, on the other hand, is sixteen in three days, and he’s—he puts it to himself for the first time—going into his second season rated fourth in the world.

Which is pretty fucking good.

It’s not good _enough_ , but he can work with it.

They’re heading off—Otabek to the sports center, Yuri to a comic shop that the Katsudon had recommended—when Otabek says in an undertone, “What if _I_ wanted to pull a GPF.”

“Tell me where to stand,” replies Yuri. “Hope you’ve been working.”

His friend, Worlds 2015 silver medalist, shakes his head and says, “Slept instead. Damn.”

“One of these years,” Yuri says consolingly. “We got time.”

**Author's Note:**

> (Viktor's music for his return to competitive skating is Rimsky-Korsakov: selections from Op. 29 (Fairy Tale) for his SP, selections from Scheherazade mvt. I for his free skate. because he's extra.)
> 
> this is more of a linking sketch than plot development, I know, but hey, there's gonna be a wedding. thanks for reading!


End file.
